The Real Story: My rise & fall through it all: my struggles with finding happiness and love while fumbling through depression. Finding success, wealth, and notoriety while encountering equal, if not greater, failures and errors in judgement. Then finding myself somehow discovering and recapturing love and other things I had lost along the way. And in all of this, I have now realized what I sacrificed and those I hurt by paying the ultimate price; the Dao of Chris.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Thank you, NPR...

Can't remember the show but it was talking
about dopamine production which is kind of a 'feel good' element our
brain produces so that we will eat, mate, and do other pleasurable
things that are conducive to the race continuing...

Seems like some monkeys were rigged with strategically placed needles and wires to record bursts of dopamine.

The monkey being studied was locked in a room. The researchers would
walk down the hall, open the door, turn on a light, say 'Hello, Monkey',
and give it some orange juice.

As soon as the monkey drank some orange juice, the receptors monitoring
dopamine release sounded. As the days (weeks?) of the test progressed,
dopamine release would be recorded at earlier stages starting with
'Hello, Monkey', all the way back to the footfalls in the hallway.

One conclusion drawn was that the brain will look for patterns which
might presage a burst of dopamine release. It wants it. It will try to
determine how/when it might be delivered so that it is ready. The
researchers did not go so far as to say that the brain might try to set
up events favorable to dopamine release but I inferred they thought it
might be so.

Which is all just to say, enjoy that anticipation of the next lemon drop
martini. We've gotta have a -little- feeling of pleasure in life, don't
we?